An Approach for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Design Patterns in Software Evolution

In recent years, the influences of design patterns on software quality have attracted increasing attention in the area of software engineering, as design patterns encapsulate valuable knowledge to resolve design problems, and more importantly to improve the design quality. Numerous design patterns improve design quality by means of providing a more flexible architecture to enhance the maintainability. Therefore, many systems applied design patterns in the early design and expect the patterns will contribute to the system evolution. However, many systems applied wrong patterns- the patterns are never applied in the future evolution. In this case, we call these patterns are "effective-less in the evolution". In this paper, we will propose an evaluation approach to evaluate the effectiveness of a pattern in an evolution. We also develop a tool and to evaluate some well-known open source systems in this research.